Artificial intelligence (AI) vs natural language processing (NLP): what are the differences?

How often are you now casually conversing with some sort of black (or white) box? Natural Language Processing (NLP) has become an integral part of our daily lives: whether we ask our smartphone for directions or engage with Alexa or Google, NLP and its subcategories are working hard behind the scenes, translating our voice or text input and (hopefully) provide appropriate voice or text output.

But what is NLP and how does it relate to artificial intelligence (AI) in general? The distinctions matter, because NLP is as valuable, if not more, in business as it is in our personal lives.

[ Check out our quick-scan primer on 10 key artificial intelligence terms for IT and business leaders: Cheat sheet: AI glossary. ]

AI, definition

With AI, computers can learn to perform a task without ever being explicitly programmed to do so.

Let’s start with AI, the larger category in which NLP resides, and a number of other types of machine-based intelligence. “AI is the use of complex logic or advanced analytical methods to do simple tasks on a larger scale so that we can do it on a larger scale with the workers we have, allowing them to focus on what humans do best, like handling complex exceptions or showing sympathy, ”said Whit Andrews, vice president and senior analyst at Gartner.

AI is essentially a computerized simulation of human intelligence, says Zachary Jarvinen, head of technology strategy, AI and analytics at OpenText, which can be programmed to make decisions, perform specific tasks and learn from the results.

With AI, computers can learn to perform a task without ever being explicitly programmed to do so, says Timothy Havens, William and Gloria Jackson associate professor of computer systems at Michigan Technological University’s College of Computing and director of the Institute. of Computing and Cybersystems.

For those who prefer analogies, Havens likens how AI works to learning to ride a bike: “You don’t tell a child to move their left foot in a circle on the left pedal forward while moving a circle… You give them a nudge and tell them to keep the bike straight and pointed forward: the overall goal. They fall multiple times, honing their skills each time they fail. It’s AI in a nutshell.

AI vs NLP, explained

When you take AI and focus it on human linguistics, you get NLP.

“NLP allows humans to talk to machines:” This branch of AI enables computers to understand, interpret and manipulate human language.

Like machine learning or deep learning, NLP is a subset of AI. But when exactly does AI become NLP? SAS offers a clear and basic explanation of the term: “Natural language processing allows humans to talk to machines. It is the branch of AI that enables computers to understand, interpret and manipulate human language.

NLP itself has a number of subsets, including Natural Language Understanding (NLU), which refers to machine reading comprehension, and Natural Language Generation (NLG), which can transform people. data in human words. But, says Wayne Butterfield, director of cognitive automation and innovation at ISG, “the premise is the same: understand language and sew something on the back of that understanding.”

Natural language processing allows computers to extract keywords and phrases, understand the intent of the language, translate it into another language, or generate a response.

NLP has its roots in linguistics, where it emerged to enable computers to literally process natural language, says Anil Vijayan, vice president of Everest Group. “Over time it has moved from rule-based approaches to machine learning infused approaches, thus overlapping with AI. ”

In addition to techniques derived from the field of computational linguistics, NLP (which may also be referred to as speech recognition in some contexts) could use both machine learning and deep learning methodologies in order to ingest and process efficiently unstructured speech and text datasets, says JP Baritugo, director of the business transformation and outsourcing consultancy Pace Harmon.

What does NLP look like in action? Let’s take a look at some of the issues it can fix: